Thanks to reader Henry!!

By Tyler Durden

China has now placed hundreds of millions of its citizens under quarantine, leaving its economy grinding to a halt.

Workers can’t leave their homes. Factories are idle. Most (if not all) of China’s ports are no longer shipping. International flights are increasingly banned from the country.

As PeakProsperity.com’s Chris Martenson details below, when the world’s #2 economy hangs up a big “CLOSED” sign, that’s going to result in a major negative impact on global trade.

As the manufacturing powerhouse to the world, you’ll be challenged to think of ANY industry that won’t experience serious supply chain interruptions and shortages from China’s woes. For instance, did you know China makes the vast majority of our prescription pharmaceuticals?

https://youtu.be/ir79nIFbobA

A MASSIVE hit to the global economy will directly result from the damage the Wuhan coronavirus is currently doing. And it may get worse, a lot worse, as The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard points out, “the longer Beijing enforces curbs on work and travel, the greater the global economic shock.”

The Chinese economy is 17pc of the world economy and deeply integrated into international supply chains. It was just 4.5pc of world GDP during the SARS epidemic 2003, which some like to use as a reassuring template. You cannot shut down China for long these days without shutting down the world.

Wednesday’s investor euphoria at reports of two new wonder drugs from Zhejiang University show how badly unhinged the market has become. This is not the way that medical science advances. Nor could these anti-virals possibly be ready, in time and at scale, to avert serious economic upheaval.

The open question is whether the coronavirus shock is enough to abort the fragile economic recovery underway since last summer’s near miss, when frightened central bankers in the US, Europe and 47 other jurisdictions cut rates in a drastic monetary U-turn.